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What will work and jobs look like in the next 10 to 20 years? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Advances in software and hardware automation pose a real threat to blue and white collar jobs alike. This trend is accelerating, driven by the convergence of unexpectedly rapid advances in machine learning, rapidly decreasing hardware and sensor costs, and also a somewhat-self-fulfilling frenzy of interest. In the Industrial Age, steam and later electricity-powered machinery became engines—both literally and metaphorically—for a profound new wave of economic value creation, and with it, a massive shakeup of the employment landscape. (Between 1880 and 1920, agriculture jobs nearly halved from 48% to 25% of the total workforce, with the lion's share shifting to manufacturing.) Today, the value chain has shifted from mechanized production to information production and manipulation, and software is the engine of this new economy. But while capital requirements for owning physical machinery made it prohibitive for all but an elite minority to participate in the creation, as opposed to merely the usage of these tools, creating software has dramatically lower capital costs (i.e. access to a computer) and therefore could theoretically allow the entire populace to participate in the renaissance. Yet clearly there are still strong barriers to entry, perhaps the most profound of which are the steep learning curves involved. As MIT economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson put it: “It’s the great paradox of our era. Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.” The question becomes one of timing—will the shift in jobs leave millions by the wayside because they can’t learn the new tools of the trade faster than the old jobs disappear? We needn't sit around pondering this dilemma passively; it's a great opportunity—driven by a dire need—to proactively and intentionally design systems via public policy, nonprofits, and for-profit platforms to narrow the gap between people and the creation of open-ended informational value. Some examples of interesting attempts at this include:
- UBI initiatives, currently under experimentation by Y Combinator and Finland, which help provide a buffer to keep people afloat during the shift and enable them to invest in creative pursuits and skillset expansion.
- The introduction of computer science and software engineering as a core part of the public education curriculum, as advocated by organizations such as The Hour of Code is here! and their post-collegiate counterparts like Dev Bootcamp, General Assembly, or Bit Source.
- Nonprofits like the Sama group that help people navigate the digital work economy.
- Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Patreon that create more fluid markets for entrepreneurial and artistic endeavors.
- Software platforms that lower the barrier to entry for individuals to create open-ended informational value.
I am personally most excited about the latter, and I believe that it is the responsibility of the creators of these platforms to consider this dimension of human empowerment vs. marginalization in their design, as it is often a matter of design choice as to how much creative freedom is afforded to the user. Too often the baby is thrown out with the bathwater in the pursuit of simplicity in software. Complexity for users is not a bad thing when it provides useful new degrees of expressive freedom and is reduced to its simplest form. There is another software revolution—much like the one previously ushered in by personal computing—waiting to happen, and democratization of informational value creation is at its core.
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